Beer Radar
By John Krüger
Fizzy beer in my day. (previously unpublished)
We only had two beers when I was young growing up in country South Australia. The one the oldies drank which was West End Draught, which to me has always had a bit of a dirty earthy taste, and West End Export, which has slightly less dirt taste but did have a dash of lawn clippings. They were both cold, fizzy, the right colour for a beer and got you pissed after a while. We didn’t drink them whilst gazing at plasma screens or flipping listlessly through video jukeboxes. We nodded in the dark politely to old people at the bar and made polite conversation when pressed. The un-air-conditioned car outside was now hitting 65C+, the un-air-conditioned bar was hovering above 35C and we drank cold, fizzy, piss coloured beer and we loved it.
Then we got soft. The window rattler air-conditioner crept in and and the old arm-pitty guy would sit in front of it all afternoon. He’d be the guy chain smoking with the publican. Both of them sitting on ponies; little 140ml glasses of freshly poured beer. A couple of mouthfuls to empty while they’re still cold. No fresh glasses in those days. You’d give a half a dozen used glasses to the barmaid and she’d fill them all up and give them all back in random order. Before long someone had decided that a TV was a good idea and for a while, listening to the farmers make crude jokes about anyone on the news was a unique experience. But then came the bingo machine, the Frogger machine, the smokes machine, the Keno screens, the six TAB TV’s, the video jukebox and the extra plasma TV’s. People got too tight to pay $2 for a 3 minute song by Bananarama on the video jukebox, so they put in a concert ready sound system hooked up to an iPod under the bar. As soon as someone can be heard talking, it’s turned up. The air conditioning is so cold, I head back out into the blinding heat just to balance out the core temperature a bit. People scurry from their icy cold cars past the verandah and inside to the screens and the cold where they sit and stare. West End Export isn’t there anymore, the kids ask for Super Dry or Extra Dry. Neither of them taste dry to me but they’ve never been dry before. Parched in a stinking hot car on a 45C day, tonguing for a beer…any beer. They’ve never been thirsty.
